Climate reparations and climate repair

Climate reparations and climate repair

Week 12: Rethinking restoration as reconstruction

Ryan Schram
ANTH 1002: Anthropology in the world
Monday, October 21, 2024

Slides available at https://anthro.rschram.org/1002/2024/12.1

Main reading: Barra (2024)

How colonialism reshapes space

A frontier is the space beyond the outer edge of a territory. If one zone is governed by law, then the frontier is the limit of that law.

Many societies are based on the myth of the frontier (Weber [1992] 2009; cf. Turner 1921):

• Australia: The myth of terra nullius (no man’s land).
• The United States, Canada: The myth of the “wild West” open for settlement.
• Indonesia: Transmigration programs were a strategy for developing rural areas and creating national unity but, according to critics, were really a “Javanization” effort (Hoshour 1997).
• Tsarist and Soviet Russia viewed Siberia and Central Asia as empty places they could expand into (Bassin 1991).

In reality, no space is empty. What is perceived as an empty frontier is usually a borderlands, a meeting place or “middle ground” (White 1991; see also Reynolds [1981] 2006).

• In the borderlands, different people and communities encounter and interact with each other, and in some way negotiate whether and how they will share space, land, and the natural environment.

The myth of the frontier only makes sense if you sustain a fiction of land as private property, that is, something you can take.

• As Marx says, property is theft; so expansion into a “frontier” is really dispossession of people living in the borderlands (e.g. Li and Semedi 2021).

People are still pretending that borderlands are new frontiers

Mining is digging up nonrenewable resources. Every mine eventually runs dry.

Mining companies need to find virgin land. Since they can’t find it, they make it (Watts 2004).

So-called “sacrifice zones” are places that powerful groups define as empty frontiers.

Environmental racism

We can see a lot of evidence for vast racial differences in the impact of environmental destruction, and today the effects of climate change.

Omi and Winant’s ([1986] 2014) concept of a “racial formation” is relevant here.

• In the US, African Americans are much more likely to be exposed to pollution and toxic chemicals than other groups (Bullard 1993; Taylor 2014).
• Australian Indigenous communities in urban areas are more likely to be affected by polluting industries and mining pollution disproportionately affects remote communities (Green, Sullivan, and Nolan 2017)
  • In Australia, where mining is so central to the economy, the inequality of environmental harm arises from the making of resource frontiers.

Urban heat islands are found in poor neighborhoods. A hot summer day is hot for everyone, but it is harmful for people who can’t sit in the shade, use air conditioning, or go to a neighborhood pool (Newsome 2023).

• No, convincing people to use their A/C less is not a good idea.

In many respects, “we” have not met the enemy. Communities with the least resources and political power have met them, though.

Expert knowledge and environmental racism

Melissa Checker (2007) carried out ethnographic research in a community organization in a heavily polluted neighborhood in Augusta, Georgia.

The neighborhood residents needed to convince public officials that

• Pollution, not poverty, was making them sick
• Environmental standards were themselves biased

When living in a polluted environment, people often say they “know it’s true” that pollution makes them sick, even when experts say that the levels of pollution are too high.

Ulrich Beck has a point. contemporary societies are highly dependent on expert knowledge based in scientific observation.

But scientific knowledge has its own cultural biases, and a society’s blind trust in scientific expertise reproduces these biases.

Are you concerned about cultural continuity?

In the article by Monique Barra we read this week, she argues that Ironton people’s approach to restoration is a “practice of cultural continuity” (Barra 2024, 153):

Many of the Black coastal communities I worked with were similarly steeped in histories of autonomous worldmaking deeply rooted to local ecologies that shaped their approach to coastal restoration. Compared to frameworks of restoration predicated on land loss and natural processes, many Black community leaders in Plaquemines Parish approach questions about land and future of Plaquemines around the past—specifically through invocations of holding land across generations of kin over time. (Barra 2024, 153)

She also writes,

Potawatomi scholars Kyle Powers Whyte and Robin Kimmerer suggest ecological repair is a cultural practice that mends and strengthens relations between human and nonhuman kin across time. Whyte calls this as “collective continuance:” the practice of (re)establishing restorative relations between humans and the environment through ecological practices. Collective continuance refers to relations of interdependence, responsibility, and care for the social resilience of Indigenous peoples, cultures, and the environment as they shift and evolve over time. (Barra 2024, 154)

How do you interpret the idea of cultural continuity here?

Should anthropologists seek to understand the basis for people’s cultural continuity?

Here is a Padlet for your thoughts: https://sydney.padlet.org/ryanschram/what-does-cultural-continuity-mean-nxgik12cpp3jl7ap

What is happening in Plaquemines Parish?

The landscape of this environment is “semi-solid, semi-liquid” (Barra 2024, 151).

• Google Maps of Plaquemines Parish
• Bernstein, Joel, prod. and Dan Rather. “Sons of Leander.” 1980. Video. 60 Minutes. CBS. https://commerce.veritone.com/search/asset/42901330.

The total land available is shrinking, and this area may need to be flooded so that other areas can stay dry.

Two ideologies of restoration

• Based on a rational mastery of nature through technology, engineering, and scientific prediction
• Based on a sense of place and of “continuity” with the past

What does restoration based on continuity actually mean?

• Anthropologists often emphasize the importance of continuity.
• Government agencies that work with the people of Isle de Jean Charles also speak of continuity of Indigenous culture.
• Ironton residents seek to maintain intergenerational continuity.

References and further reading

Barra, Monica Patrice. 2024. “Restoration Otherwise: Towards Alternative Coastal Ecologies.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 42 (1): 147–65. https://doi.org/10.1177/02637758221146179.

Bassin, Mark. 1991. “Inventing Siberia: Visions of the Russian East in the Early Nineteenth Century.” The American Historical Review 96 (3): 763–94. https://doi.org/10.2307/2162430.

Bullard, Robert D. 1993. “The Threat of Environmental Racism.” Natural Resources & Environment 7 (3): 23–26, 55–56.

Checker, Melissa. 2007. “‘But I Know It’s True’: Environmental Risk Assessment, Justice, and Anthropology.” Human Organization 66 (2): 112–24. https://doi.org/10.17730/humo.66.2.1582262175731728.

Green, Donna, Marianne Sullivan, and Karrina Nolan. 2017. “Environmental Injustice in Resource-Rich Aboriginal Australia.” In The Routledge Handbook of Environmental Justice. Routledge.

Hoshour, Cathy A. 1997. “Resettlement and the Politicization of Ethnicity in Indonesia.” Bijdragen Tot de Taal-, Land- En Volkenkunde 153 (4): 557–76. https://www.jstor.org/stable/27865389.

Li, Tania Murray, and Pujo Semedi. 2021. Plantation Life: Corporate Occupation in Indonesia’s Oil Palm Zone. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478022237.

Newsome, Melba. 2023. “Discrimination Has Trapped People of Color in Unhealthy Urban ‘Heat Islands’.” Scientific American, October 1, 2023. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/discrimination-has-trapped-people-of-color-in-unhealthy-urban-heat-islands/.

Omi, Michael, and Howard Winant. (1986) 2014. “The Theory of Racial Formation.” In Racial Formation in the United States. London: Routledge. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/usyd/detail.action?docID=1715791.

Reynolds, Henry. (1981) 2006. The Other Side of the Frontier: Aboriginal Resistance to the European Invasion of Australia. Sydney: UNSW Press.

Taylor, Dorceta. 2014. Toxic Communities: Environmental Racism, Industrial Pollution, and Residential Mobility. New York: New York University Press. https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9781479805150.001.0001.

Turner, Frederick Jackson. 1921. The frontier in American history. New York: Holt & Co. http://archive.org/details/frontierinameric00turn_3.

Watts, Michael. 2004. “Violent Environments: Petroleum Conflict and the Political Ecology of Rule in the Niger Delta, Nigeria.” In Liberation Ecologies: Environment, Development and Social Movements, edited by Richard Peet and Michael Watts, 250–72. London: Routledge. https://api.taylorfrancis.com/content/chapters/edit/download?identifierName=doi&identifierValue=10.4324/9780203235096-15&type=chapterpdf.

Weber, David J. (1992) 2009. The Spanish Frontier in North America: The Brief Edition. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press.

White, Richard. 1991. The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.